You all have no idea what I've been through this week. I have literally hauled 3 tons of cinderblocks. I did the math. I've fought with all sorts of weirdness and problems in my web classes. I even aced a trigonometry quiz, and I knew next to nothing of trigonometry until last week. But that's all irrelevant. Because the most important thing here to this blog, is the next update. I kinda sorta did miss a day, but mainly because it also happened to be the end of the web class week, so I was dealing with that. After singlehandedly finishing the block hauling job, your hero got right back to work on Adventurer, and turned the half-done job of mindless humans standing about in their houses into some decently proper quest givers.
If you go to see one, they'll want an item, and in exchange for it, they'll give you another item. They're persistent like levels are; which is to say, only semi. They won't know if you've completed a quest before when you come back, but you don't have to worry about them wanting a stick one time and wanting a flail when you come back. Later, when truly persistent levels are in, I'll do that kind of thing. Also, I fixed a few small things. Including the whole infinite rope thing as Anonymous so kindly pointed out.
Also of note, I got a FormSpring account. If you're shy about comments here or just want to ask a question there, go right ahead. I increased the number of 'gadgets' here on Blogspot, I didn't just willy nilly add all, just the stuff I thought wouldn't be a total waste of bandwidth. I'm on dial-up, I know these things. Also, no one has edited the wiki at all. :/ Link comin' at you whoa.
And finally, plans for next week. I actually had a conversation with one of my cousins where I basically rattle off huge walls of text, and then suddenly inspiration strikes. "I think I'll let the player be any creature. I wonder if I should balance it, like having new dragon adventurers be totally wimpy and rat adventurers be totally awesome. Or not. I could leave it natural, but then all the powergamers would pick dragon and go on a rampage, kill everyone in town, or at least until... ...the other adventurers hear about you and come after you." Yeah, maybe not all of that latter part will be in, but I'm totally going to work at letting the player be an adventurer of any race in the book.
The long term implications of this, when Adventurer is more developed, is that the creatures with a higher difficulty class are also going to have a higher natural level of fame. Dragons are sorta a big deal for fame-seeking adventurers. Rats? Not so much. New and wimpy adventurers just starting out. I do see that balancing in the long run; you can be tougher but hassled more often, or you can be weaker with less glory-seekers trying to kill you, letting you work in more subtle and secret ways. So I think this will be the first step of something good.
Sounds like I'm kind of like you in my brainstorming... but with me it's rattling off random ideas to my wife who has absolutely no clue what I'm talking about and has never touched a Roguelike in her life. : P
ReplyDeleteIn any event, my most recent blog post might have some inspiration fodder for you. I didn't tease the idea out a whole lot, but basically I'm brainstorming about a level-less system with relative stats. The main thought that seems pertinent to this post is conceiving of player stats as relative values instead of absolute values - how do your stats compare to others of the same race and how do your race's average stats compare to other races' averages. A very tough rat will just never come anywhere near the power of a very weak dragon, for example, but he would also be so relatively small that his stealth would let him win past the dragon and still his gold one piece at a time...
Anyways, lemme know if you see any good ideas in here that I should pursue, and feel free to be inspired yourself. ; )
https://roguewombat.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/level-less-gameplay-and-player-stats/
I linked you into the sidebar - looking forward to seeing your project develop. I'm a little curious where the .NET dependency comes in if you're using SDL... does C# only compile to Windows?
I read through the blog post, and that sounds similar to how I was already planning growth. Like how humans can't expect to be punching out demon lords without some sort of magical buffing. I recommend you pursue that option of having relative growth rather than absolute. It should be simple enough to implement as a bonus that is applied to a given creature's base stats.
ReplyDeleteAs far as Adventurer, character growth is going to be measured more in how many secrets, artifacts, and permanent buffs you've gained, as well as your skill with using the many things at your disposal. The starting race, though will definitely be a great modifier on how you play. I have full intentions of making methods other than brute force a good way to get through the game.
Rats are of course going to act a lot like the Nethack joke class Tourist; horribly underpowered, but with exploitable components that still make them fun to play. Rats, for example, are going to have the innate ability to squeeze through doors soundlessly, and be so unnoticeable it may as well be invisibility. They will also have incredibly high boosts to stealth and dashing. The best strategy will likely be to squeeze and sneak into hard-to-reach areas hiding powerful secrets, and use them later on. It is assumed that the player creature, no matter what it is, is guided by sentience. Assume something reincarnated as a rat.
Okay, it will always probably be a joke race. Still, it doesn't mean you're always doomed to be squished underfoot.
As far as .NET dependency, that is linked purely to a quirk of C#; its usage automatically requires .NET. However, it only needs 2.0, which is automatically included with like every Windows ever, and can easily be run on other platforms using Mono. I haven't actually got many testers to try it out. Just one, actually, on Linux. The problem was that his Mono version didn't link to the right SDL dll replacement folder; it ran perfectly fine up to the point where it tried to load images, where it couldn't find the replacement .so file. It loaded fonts just fine. The fix was fairly easy. He never got around to fixing it that I know of. However, I just downloaded VirtualBox, which should let me emulate other systems, so I can start testing this stuff myself. I have thought about converting to C++. It's still a possibility, if C# is truly knocking out cross-platform compatibility. I won't know for sure until some more experimentation is done. I hope so, C# is so much easier to write in, and hence, I can get more out faster.